Blue Streak (1999)

FILM REVIEW; When Too Much Success Plagues a Diamond Thief

By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER

Published: September 18, 1999

High concept linked to a lower-middlebrow script creates the not-so-heady brew that is ''Blue Streak.''

With Martin Lawrence as its star, ''Blue Streak'' is another of those action comedies dating back to ''Beverly Hills Cop'' that rely on a likable, streetwise, fast-talking character to pump the helium of humor into familiar proceedings. In this instance, the buoyancy is only intermittent.

''Blue Streak,'' directed by Les Mayfield and written by the committee of Michael Berry, John Blumenthal and Steve Carpenter, pivots on an elaborate nighttime jewel heist gone wrong. When the incompetent wheelman, Tulley (Dave Chappelle), attracts the attention of the police by dumping an ashtray full of butts out his car window while awaiting the getaway, and when the homicidally traitorous Deacon (Peter Greene) attempts to increase his share of the burglary proceeds by shooting a confederate, who plummets from a rooftop onto a patrol car, the safecracker, Miles Logan (Martin Lawrence), is left holding the bag.

It is only a small bag, but inside is a single diamond valued at $18 million. During his effort to evade capture, Logan flees to a construction site and manages to tape the bag to the wall of an air-conditioning vent before he is arrested.

Released from prison two years later, he discovers that the construction site has become a Los Angeles police station whose inner precincts are barred to all but criminals and lawmen. Thanks to forged identity documents, Logan passes himself off as a newly transferred detective, and when a criminal runs loose while Logan is detaching a vent cover in the women's bathroom, he becomes an instant hero and the new leader of the burglary unit.

Not long afterward, while downing a snack in a convenience store, he finds himself in the middle of a stickup and manages -- unarmed -- to capture the gunman, who just happens to be his old pal Tulley. And next thing he knows, using his criminal thought processes, he outwits the arrogant F.B.I. in a huge heroin case just as his old nemesis, Deacon, comes to cash in on Logan's recovery of the diamond.

Among movies of its type, ''Blue Streak'' may be classified among the zircons.

Directed by Les Mayfield; written by Michael Berry, John Blumenthal and Steve Carpenter; director of photography, David Eggby; edited by Michael Tronick; music by Edward Shearmur; production designer, Bill Brzeski; produced by Toby Jaffe and Neal H. Moritz; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 93 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.